For protecting the safety and benefit of children, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission imposed an important regulation that "Child below 5 years old cannot light the lighter". Some of the piezoelectric lighters, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,786,248, 4,859,172, 5,240,408, 5,368,473, and 5,462,432, each provides a switching mechanism for rendering the piezoelectric lighter child resistant. Each switching mechanism provides a switch member requiring the adult user to turn on before permitting an thumb-operated piezoelectric unit to be depressed to lift a gas pipe to open a gas release valve to emit gas and to generate sparks at the same time to ignite the emitted gas.
However, such conventional piezoelectric lighters with switching mechanism also bear the drawbacks as follows:
1. Some switching mechanisms require the piezoelectric lighter to alter its structure in order to equip with the switch member Or, numerous of additional elements of the switching mechanism are required to incorporate with the traditional piezoelectric lighter for ensuring the safety feature thereof Such costly switching mechanism not only increases the cost of the lighter, but also increases the manufacturing procedures of the lighter.
2. If the user forgets to turn off the switch member to its locking position, the piezoelectric lighter is already to ignite by any child. In other words, such switching-type safety piezoelectric lighter can provide safety function if and only if the adult user remembers to operate an additional turning off action to re-lock the switching mechanism of the piezoelectric lighter again. Most users may even intentionally skip this re-locking operation.
In fact, the conventional switching mechanism of the piezoelectric lighter is a manual lock only but can not be classified as a safety lock because a real safety lighter should normally be locked, that is the piezoelectric lighter should automatically re-lock after each ignition operation, so as to prevent the children from igniting the lighter anytime, or to prevent the lighter from accidentally or unintentionally be ignited by the user.